Offer sheets are a lot like being Marlon Brandon in The Godfather. You try to make someone an offer they can’t refuse, and everyone thinks you’re a bad guy because of it.
It’s no real surprise that the topic of offer sheets has come up again in Vancouver hockey circles. The Canucks are, notably, in the midst of a search for a genuine 2C, and there happen to be at least a couple of very good young centre RFAs still without contracts at this mid-way point in the offseason.
But for a multitude of reasons, offer sheets remain one of the rarest occurrences in the wide world of hockey transactions. So, how realistic is it for the Canucks to pull off at this stage in the summer?
Let’s talk about it.
Who can receive an offer sheet?
First and foremost, a player needs to be a restricted free agent in order to receive an offer sheet. These RFAs are distinct from unrestricted free agents, or UFAs, in that they’re not freely available to the leaguewide market. All RFAs have had their rights retained by their current teams through the making of a minimal qualifying offer – but they haven’t agreed yet to that offer, or to any others made by their club.
A quick glance at our friends over at PuckPedia tells us that, as of this Friday morning writing, there are still 20 unsigned RFAs left in the league. However, not all of them are eligible for offer sheets.
An RFA also needs the requisite experience in order to be eligible for an offer sheet. If the player signed their entry-level contract between the ages of 18 and 21, that’s three years of professional experience. If they signed between 22 and 23, it’s two pro years, and anything past that requires just one pro year.
If a player hasn’t hit these thresholds, they’re deemed a “10.2c” RFA and are not eligible to receive offer sheets. This includes a few of the remaining RFAs, most notably Luke Hughes of the New Jersey Devils, and also Alex Laferriere of the Los Angeles Kings.
A player is also not eligible for an offer sheet if they or their team have opted for arbitration. This actually covers a lot of the remaining RFAs, including Dylan Samberg of the Winnipeg Jets, Jayden Struble of the Montreal Canadiens, Nick Robertson of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Conor Timmins of the Buffalo Sabres.
Really, that leaves just a small handful of those still able to receive offer sheets as of late July.
Fortunately, for the Canucks’ part, that list includes two players they should be very interested in: Mason McTavish of the Anaheim Ducks, and Marco Rossi of the Minnesota Wild.
When can a team make an offer sheet?
It’s important to remember that offer sheets are two-way streets. They have to be accepted by the player for the process to truly begin, and players are always free to turn them down. But before that can happen, the offer has to be made.
Offer sheets can be made to any eligible player at any point between July 1 and December 1 in any given year. So, the Canucks still have a few months to consider offer sheets for McTavish or Rossi if they wish – so long as their negotiations with their current teams continue to stay at a standstill.
However, teams are not allowed to make offer sheets unless they already have the required compensation on hand already.
When an offer sheet is made, the team who originally held that player’s rights has a week to decide if they want to match it – meaning the player signs the same contract as in the offer sheet, but with their original club – or to accept the already-prescribed draft pick compensation package instead.
For the 2025-26 contractual season, the compensation structure looks like this:
| Offer Sheet AAV | < $1,544,424 | $1,544,425 – $2,340,037 | $2,340,038 – $4,680,076 | $4,680,077 – $7,020,113 | $7,020,114 – $9,360,153 | $9,360,154 – $11,700,192 | > $11,700,193 |
| Compensation | None | 1x 3rd Round Pick | 1x 2nd Round Pick | 1x 1st Round Pick and 1x 3rd Round Pick | 1x 1st Round Pick, 1x 2nd Round Pick, and 1x 3rd Round Pick | 2x 1st Round Picks, 1x 2nd Round Pick, and 1x 3rd Round Pick | 4x 1st Round Picks |
There are a couple of key things to remember with this chart.
The first and that teams don’t really get to pick and choose which picks are included with the offer sheet. For the most part, it’s a team’s own picks in the next draft – meaning, for this offer sheet period, they need to come from the 2026 draft. The only exemption to this is at the two highest tiers, where compensations involving multiple picks in the same round allow for an extra year per extra pick in order to decide (meaning a team needing to give up two first round picks would have to give them up between 2026 and 2028.)
As well, note that the offer sheet’s AAV is always derived by dividing the total offer sheet by the number of contract years or five, whichever number is lowest. A seven-year offer sheet, in other words, is still dividing by only five years for the purposes of determining the compensation, and thus can get quite expensive.
As we said, the Canucks can’t even make an offer they’re not eligible to pay compensation for, and as they currently do not possess their 2026 third round selection (traded to Calgary for Nikita Zadorov two seasons ago), they are ineligible for most tiers of offer sheets, as all but three require a team’s own third.
The three tiers the Canucks are currently eligible for are the lowest tier (no compensation), the $2,340,038 – $4,680,076 tier (one second round pick), and the maximum tier (four first round picks).
That, unfortunately, leaves their options extremely limited.
The Canucks could again become eligible for all of the offer sheet tiers…if they were able to reacquire their 2026 third rounder from the Flames. But that would be entirely up to the Flames, and it’s hard to imagine pulling off such a deal without Calgary knowing exactly what they were up to.
How does it apply to McTavish and Rossi?
As it stands, the Canucks are still eligible to make offer sheets to McTavish and Rossi – but only certain offer sheets.
Let’s dispense with the lower tiers right away. Neither McTavish nor Rossi is going to sign for below $1,544,424, and if they did, their teams would happily match.
The same goes for that second round tier, which requires offers of values between $2,340,038 and $4,680,076. If either player were willing to sign for that amount, it’d already be done, and the Ducks and Wild would be grateful for the opportunity to match.
For now, that leaves the Canucks with that uppermost tier. And it’s a doozy: signing players at the uppermost tier requires four first round picks from the next five drafts. These picks cannot have any protection applied to them, either, save for the option to skip one year of compensation out of the five. That’s an incredibly risky proposition for any team, but especially a team in the Canucks’ own mercurial position.
We do think that, if either Rossi or McTavish were to be offered an offer sheet with a value in excess of $11,700,193, they’d sign it. They’d be foolish not to. And there are ways to play around with it. The Canucks could look to offer that amount for just a single year, and then hope to sign the player to something more reasonable once their rights were secured. This is something that the Carolina Hurricanes did with Jesperi Kotkaniemi back in the day, though that didn’t exactly work out for them.
That’s probably a better option than committing to paying either player that amount over the long-term, something they haven’t earned yet and might not ever.
There’s no possibility for the cap-strapped Wild to match an offer on Rossi of that max-tier magnitude. The Ducks, with their $20 million+ of cap space, would be able to match, but they might reasonably choose to take the four first round picks instead.
But is either player truly worth four first round picks – not to mention at least a year of an $11,700,193+ salary (something the Canucks would need to move a lot of cap out in order to fit)?
It’s hard to get to a place where the answer to that question is ‘yes.’ Which means the answer to the question in the headline, of whether it’s realistic to expect a mid-summer offer sheet from the Canucks, is still ‘no.’
